Some parts of Valley Speak were really cemented in the 1982 Frank Zappa song “Valley Girl,” in which Zappa’s 14-year-old daughter played the character of the Valley Girl, sprinkling in phrases like “oh my god,” “totally” and “gag me with a spoon.” The stereotype of the Valley Girl really began in the 1970s, but it started to spread in the ’80s. These were the mostly white, mostly upper-middle-class young women who lived in the San Fernando Valley near Los Angeles. One of the defining linguistic phenomena of the 1980s was Val-speak, a dialect of English spoken by Valley Girls. 1980s Slang Words And Phrases Gag me with a spoon! Let’s look at just a few of the words and phrases that became popular during this decade. It’s mostly used by young people - women and Black people especially - and the 1980s were the heyday of Gen Xers, a generation too often overlooked. Slang can reveal the cultural undercurrents of a time period. There are countless different angles to take when looking at a period of 10 years, and here we’ll zoom in on just one: 1980s slang. You can’t boil down the AIDS crisis, the Reagan presidency, the Challenger explosion, hair metal bands, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of the war on drugs down to a single symbol (though the Rubik’s cube might get us close). Even after 30 years have passed, the 1980s are difficult to distill. What a wonderfully concise way of bringing the mysterious ‘Hey Diddle Diddle’ out of the realms of nonsense rhyme, and into something really quite everyday and plausible.It can be hard to really understand a decade until it’s long over. The boy saw the cat having a mishap and panicking after getting stuck to a fiddle, the cow jumping over the reflection of the moon in water, the dog simply running around and barking with excitement, and the dish and spoon being those from his own supper, sliding into a brook. Frank Baum retold ‘Hey Diddle Diddle’ from a little boy’s perspective. When he wrote story versions of the Mother Goose nursery rhymes in 1897, Wizard of Oz author L. Many historians believe the rhyme could be even older, dating back to the 16th century or further. ‘Hey Diddle Diddle’ is believed to originate from the 1700s, with the lyrics and melody we know today first published by the composer and nursery rhyme collector James William Elliott, in his 1870 collection National Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Songs. What are the origins of the nursery rhyme? Tolkien satirised ‘Hey Diddle Diddle’ and all the theories surrounding its meaning, in his original song ‘The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late’ – first published in Yorkshire Poetry magazine and then again in Lord of the Rings. The “diddle” is fitting for the speculation and cheating that has been recorded as apparent in Tudor politics. There are even Ancient Egyption themes that creep into the theories of ‘Hey Diddle Diddle’.Īnd there’s one more area of speculation worth mentioning: the history-based theories that the rhyme depicts either Lady Katherine Grey, a granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister Mary, who had dual relationships with the Earl of Hertford and the Earl of Leicester, or Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII’s first wife. James Halliwell-Phillipps, a 19th-century Shakespeare scholar and collector of English nursery rhymes, also had a theory that it was a corruption of ancient Greek sayings, but this has been all but discredited.Īnother theory believes the rhyme has everything to do with the stars in the night sky – that the figures correspond with constellations, with the moon-jumping cow being Taurus the bull and the laughing dog being Canis minor. Perhaps the dish and spoon running away is us, distracted by the game, missing our chance to eat our grub before the plate is carried away again. And as well as the cat and fiddle, the rhyme mentions “sport”. Famous nursery rhymes can sometimes be traced back to traditional dances or musical games, so it’s a plausible theory that that’s what ‘Hey Diddle Diddle’ is all about. An old game involving a trap-ball called a ‘cat’ used to be played at pubs, with accompanying music from the fiddle – which explains why it became a pub name at all. One credible theory, though, could be linked to those Cat and Fiddle pubs. So the above scholarly conclusion that it’s not really meant to make sense seems sensible to us. Maybe the dog is laughing and light-headed after too many ales? And how a dish can even run, we’re not sure. The Cat and Fiddle is a common name for inns in England, and the cow jumping over the moon could be a metaphor for… well, it’s not too clear.
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